From new generative AI announcements to award-winning innovation, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
AWS Throws Its Hat Into the Generative AI Ring
WS has joined the generative AI march. But, instead of building models entirely by itself, it is recruiting third parties to host models on its cloud.
Enter Amazon Bedrock. It provides the platform for users to build generative AI-powered apps from pre-trained models created by various startups. These include AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI.
In doing so, AWS is giving the pick axes, shovels, and drills to miners instead of digging for the treasures itself – as Microsoft and Google are doing.
Such a strategy is not new for AWS, according to Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon. He told CNBC:
If you think about what AWS has been doing for many years, we’ve been really trying to democratize technology so that large and small companies alike can afford and have access to build amazing customer experiences.
Until now, organizations that wished to build custom large language models (LLMs) for their unique business requirements would likely have to train the system for many years. In addition, they’d spend eye-watering sums of money.
That does not sound like an appealing prospect. AWS believes it can offer a differentiator by offering foundational models, which businesses can customize for their unique purposes.
This mission sits at the core of Bedrock, which serves up many of these models from third parties – alongside its own "Titan" models.
Now, these are not consumer models like ChatGPT or Bard. Instead, they developer-focused LLMs, which businesses can finetune and build generative AI experiences on top of.
Bandwidth Strives to Make Best-of-Breed CCaaS-UCaaS Convergence a Reality
Consider the current state of the CCaaS and UCaaS spaces, as per the latest Gartner Magic Quadrants.
NICE, Genesys, and Talkdesk are the leaders for CCaaS.
Microsoft, RingCentral, Zoom, Cisco, and 8×8 are the leaders for UCaaS.
Across these reports, no single vendor is a leader in both markets – despite a prolonged push to pull these technologies together.
Some are relatively close, including the likes of Cisco and 8×8.
Nevertheless, this status quo highlights how brands wanting to converge CCaaS and UCaaS with a single vendor must accept a “lesser” solution in one of those areas.
The alternative is for brands to cobble together best-of-breed solutions. Enter Bandwidth Maestro.
Bandwidth Releases Its Maestro Solution
Bandwidth has released its Maestro platform, positioning it as the connectivity fabric that allows businesses to bridge the gap between best-of-breed CCaaS and UCaaS tools.
"It’s an entire ecosystem of partners and integrations, pulled together with this key differentiator: a visual builder," said Travis Hinton, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Bandwidth in conversation with UC Today.
The visual builder includes a drag-and-drop interface that allows businesses to build and customize communication workflows across the two platforms.
Moreover, it also integrates with conversational AI and CPaaS platforms for businesses that wish to pull other capabilities into these workflows and extend them.
Concentrix’s Acquisition of Webhelp Is Good News for the Customer Service BPO Space
At the end of March, Concentrix announced its plans to roll up fellow BPO Webhelp.
